I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to digital communications. More particularly, the present invention relates to a novel and improved system and method for determining, at a receiver of a variable rate communication system, the rate at which data has been encoded for transmission.
II. Description of the Related Art
The use of code division multiple access (CDMA) modulation techniques is one of several techniques for facilitating communications in which a large number of system users are present. Although other techniques such as time division multiple access (TDMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), and AM modulation schemes such as amplitude companded single sideband (ACSSB) are known, CDMA has significant advantages over these other techniques. The use of CDMA techniques in a multiple access communication system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,901,307, entitled "SPREAD SPECTRUM MULTIPLE ACCESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEM USING SATELLITE OR TERRESTRIAL REPEATERS," assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated by reference herein.
CDMA systems often employ a variable rate vocoder to encode data so that the data rate can be varied from one data frame to another. An exemplary embodiment of a variable rate vocoder is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,796, entitled "VARIABLE RATE VOCODER," assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated by reference herein. The use of a variable rate communications channel reduces mutual interference by eliminating unnecessary transmissions when there is no useful speech to be transmitted. Algorithms are utilized within the vocoder for generating a varying number of information bits in each frame in accordance with variations in speech activity. For example, a vocoder with a set of four rates may produce 20 millisecond data frames containing 16, 40, 80, or 171 information bits, depending on the activity of the speaker. It is desired to transmit each data frame in a fixed amount of time by varying the transmission rate of communications.
Additional details on the formatting of the vocoder data into data frames are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,511,073, entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR THE FORMATTING OF DATA FOR TRANSMISSION," assigned to the assignee of the present invention and herein incorporated by reference. The data frames may be further processed, spread spectrum modulated, and transmitted as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,103,459, entitled "SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR GENERATING WAVEFORMS IN A CDMA CELLULAR TELEPHONE SYSTEM," assigned to the assignee of the present invention and incorporated by reference herein.
Variable rate systems can be developed which include explicit rate information. If the rate is included as part of a variable rate frame, then the rate is not recoverable until after the frame has already been properly decoded, at which point the rate has already been determined. Rather than including the rate in a variable rate frame, the rate could instead be sent in a non-variable rate portion of the frame. However, only a few bits are typically needed to represent the rate, and these bits cannot be efficiently encoded and interleaved in order to provide error protection for fading communications channels. Furthermore, the rate information is only available after some decoding delay and are subject to error.
Alternatively, variable rate systems can be developed which do not include explicit rate information. One technique for the receiver to determine the rate of a received data frame where the rate information is not explicitly included in the frame is described in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/233,570, U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,206 entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DETERMINING DATA RATE OF TRANSMITTED VARIABLE RATE DATA IN A COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVER," filed Apr. 26, 1994, assigned to the assignee of the present invention, and incorporated by reference. Another technique is described in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/126,477, entitled "MULTIRATE SERIAL VITERBI DECODER FOR CODE DIVISION MULTIPLE ACCESS SYSTEM APPLICATIONS," filed Sep. 24, 1993, assigned to the assignee of the present invention, and incorporated by reference. According to these techniques, each received data frame is decoded at each of the possible rates. Error metrics, describing the quality of the decoded symbols for each frame decoded at each rate, are provided to a processor. The error metrics may include Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) results, Yamamoto Quality Metrics, and Symbol Error Rates. These error metrics are well-known in communications systems. The processor analyzes the error metrics and determines the most probable rate at which the incoming symbols were transmitted.
Decoding each received data frame at each possible data rate will eventually generate the desired decoded data. However, the search through all possible rates is not the most efficient use of processing resources in a receiver. Also, as higher transmission rates are used, power consumption for determining the transmission rate also increases. This is because there are more bits per frame to be processed. Furthermore, as technology evolves, variable rate systems may utilize larger sets of data rates for communicating information. The use of larger sets of rates will make the exhaustive decoding at all possible rates infeasible. In addition, the decoding delay will not be tolerable for some system applications. Consequently, a more efficient rate determination system is needed in a variable rate communications environment. These problems and deficiencies are clearly felt in the art and are solved by the present invention in the manner described below.